Will *any* mobile OS emerge dominant by 2015?

The metric of direct value of the platform to users is pretty clear: more users find Android phones to be valuable enough to buy them.

You're just playing word games here. The question under examination is whether Android's larger market share translates into superior outcomes for users and/or developers.

Wrong. I'm talking only about users. The big impact of smartphones will be greatly increasing the convenience and utility to users. Developers are part of the mechanism for this, but the focus is on users.

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You're trying to claim Android's larger market share as a superior outcome for users in itself.

No, I'm claiming that the rise of smartphones is great for users, and that the smartphones that users chose have been dominated by Android smartphones because users found that those phones were "good enough" and additionally cheaper and more available than the competition.

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EgalitarianBovine wrote:

That those masses of users aren't willing to support developers to the extent that you think they should is neither here nor there. App developers are not owed support. There isn't some natural level of app usage or amount-of-time-spent-browsing (as set by iOS users) that reflects on the utility of smartphones. Repeatedly asserting so doesn't make it true.

I'm not sure I've ever asserted such a thing.

You implicitly assert it by focusing on what's good for developers. WHat's good for developers is people spending a lot of money on apps. What's good for users is getting a lot of functionality on the terms they care about. Users get solid utility from Android phones, and at better price choices and availabilities and other metrics, so they choose it. You are somehow not willing to accept the utility of those phones for those users because it doesn't seem to deliver as much revenue to users as you think it should.

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This claim is utterly ridiculous. Users spending money on apps are clearly doing so to increase the utility of the device.

That's all fine and well, but that's not the argument you made. You argued that that users NOT spending more money on apps somehow implies that they're not deriving sufficient utility from their phones.

You (and others) have no justified that argument, yet continue to make it.

I'm sure that for the people who spend money on those apps, they provide utility. For example, I'm sure Benhameen is going to get a lot of utility from his Magic: The Gathering app. That's great.

However, for most users, the marginal utility of having access to those apps doesn't seem to be enough to drive purchases of iPhones. Instead they care more about the marginal utility of device prices, availability, or other concerns.

You are trying to second-guess their value assessment and override those choices by asserting that "no, really, there IS significant value for users in app differentiation above the baseline, and those users who do not recognize this are wrong".

But you don't get to make value assessments for other people like that. The majority has spoken, and they don't care about the things you think they should care about. Try not to take it personally.

Edit:To be complete, they care about things like "coolness", "image", and other less quantifiable things as well when it comes to phone choices. On that front I think the iOS devices generally lead.

But pricing and availability is basically what makes Android dominant in terms of user preference, not those other factors. On "coolness" and "image", the high end Android phones compete somewhat well but Apple still seems to have that cornered.

Ultimately, the main point is that app differentiation beyond the baseline is being completely overplayed. It's not as important as you think it is. No amount of asserting the opposite will make it so.

Dominance and popularity are inextricably linked. We're talking about products in the marketplace, not countries on a map. Perhaps we can somehow agree on a measure other than sheer popularity, but there is no measure worth a damn that doesn't require significant popularity to make any sense whatever.

Sure. But many Android advocates seem to want to set this up as:

unit share = dominance

I believe there needs to be more than one term on the left side of that equation. It makes more sense as:

per unit value * unit share = dominance

With per-unit value itself being a composite of multiple metrics, since one needs to measure different sorts of value relevant to different stakeholders.

(By the way, I hope nobody is missing the irony of the fact that with respect to app sales you obsess over per-unit revenue, but with respect to mobile OS dominance you seem to advocate against considering per-unit value.)

No, I'm claiming that the rise of smartphones is great for users, and that the smartphones that users chose have been dominated by Android smartphones because users found that those phones were "good enough" and additionally cheaper and more available than the competition.

That's nice, but it's irrelevant to this argument. The argument is about the dominance of various smartphone platforms. Android fans want to treat unit share as dominance. My position is that we need complicate this a bit, by looking at other metrics that have traditionally been used to measure platform value, such as ecosystem strength.

You're performing a sort of rhetorical slight of hand, trying to use popularity as a proxy for value, to make this entirely about unit share again.

EgalitarianBovine wrote:

You are trying to second-guess their value assessment and override those choices by asserting that "no, really, there IS significant value for users in app differentiation above the baseline, and those users who do not recognize this are wrong".

The closest I have come to making such an argument is to note that many users do not appear to presently be treating Android devices as platform devices, and that this probably makes Android less "sticky" than iOS and may leave it vulnerable in the future.

With per-unit value itself being a composite of multiple metrics, since one needs to measure different sorts of value relevant to different stakeholders.

(By the way, I hope nobody is missing the irony of the fact that with respect to app sales you obsess over per-unit revenue, but with respect to mobile OS dominance you seem to advocate against considering per-unit value.)

I don't believe I've taken a position on the "different sorts of value" question. You seem willing to ascribe positions to me that I don't believe I have actually taken. I would certainly listen to arguments on this, but I am skeptical of their staying power.

I do think it is a substantial "herding cats" problem to get beyond simple marketshare, because, the BF being the BF, everyone will want absolutely anything else but share to be set up in a way that favors their platform. I'm not even sure that people advocating for a particular platform will be able to agree meaningfully. Between platforms? Hopeless.

I think "dominance" will not be decided by us anyway just as we won't decide "what a PC is." This is the sort of thing that will show up as a kind of rough-and-ready discussion in the trade press and the general press. At least, if we take your suggestion, this is likely what we end up with.

By that "measure" (which is anything but formal) I'd have to say Apple is actually winning right now; certainly in a relative sense. Unfortunately, it's also a very fickle measure and subject to change. Apple has also been blessed with disproportionately good press from the beginning (even in places where it is by no reasonable measure "dominant" such as OS X). Still, that's part of any game that is measured by something other than sheer share.

And, sheer market share will have a lot to do with any such change in, say, the relative coverage.

There was, as far as I can tell, a long while where Ford was at least the most beloved automaker and perhaps even dominant by volume (I don't have sales figures from the 1910s and 1920s at my elbow). But, GM eventually became the volume leader and, wouldn't you know, press interest and even adulation eventually followed.

We can even trace in a rough-and-ready way such a transition. In Brave New World, "Ford" was a principal character; even influential enough to change the political and religious beliefs (in the fictional world, at least). Just a few years later, the phrase was "what's good for General Motors is good for the rest of the country" (which was, apparently, not actually said by anyone, but resonated so well that the misquotation stuck).

In any case, if we take the thread title seriously, we're mostly talking software here and OS software at that. I don't see how we can't make marketshare a reasonably strong measure whatever we decide upon. As a thing in itself, software without share just isn't going to be very interesting. We aren't talking about Xerox PARC here.

The other piece is to see how the competition actually plays out. At least one poster suggested something I never expected to see: That Android's voice offering might be competitive with Siri. True or false, it's the first suggestion that Siri might be caught. Things like that are going to matter as well if we're going to try for alternate measures. We probably haven't seen any of this software in its more-or-less mature form (or, at least, when the sheer volume of "stuff" on both sides means that even breakthroughs kind of get swallowed up as they do on 50 million LOC plus Windows today).

The most obvious way to "decide" this is to notice the obvious: Android and iOS are carving up the market between them. There is not always a "Highlander" result for markets. Ford survived despite GM's "dominance"; we're not necessarily talking Microsoftian levels of dominance here for anyone.

Popularity is not a proxy of value when it concerns users, it's a direct measure of it. If a given user valued another phone more, or found it to have more utility, they would get that phone instead.

"More people choose this, so it's more valuable" is conflating "more valuable" with "valuable to more people". Also, if we're defining value, as, say "the importance, worth, or usefulness of something" (to pick the first dictionary definition I was able to find), it doesn't take price into account; it's not uncommon for people to select products that are less valuable because they're cheaper or more widely available.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

I do think it is a substantial "herding cats" problem to get beyond simple marketshare, because, the BF being the BF, everyone will want absolutely anything else but share to be set up in a way that favors their platform. I'm not even sure that people advocating for a particular platform will be able to agree meaningfully. Between platforms? Hopeless.

There's no way around this problem. "Simple market share" has turned out to be just as contentious as other indicators of platform strength. Rightly so — there's no reason to privilege this particular metric as being somehow more valid or more objective than others. This isn't a formal competition with predefined victory conditions. Different users legitimately value different things, and in fact different industry players are themselves playing for different outcomes. There's going to be ongoing debate.

Even with the Mac people have long cited its mindshare, noted that it's kind of screwy to compare MacBook Pros 1:1 with netbooks, and pointed to the pervasiveness of Macs at startups and conferences about new technologies as evidence that the Mac is much more important than mere market share suggests. At a 20:1 market share deficit these things weren't sufficient for anyone to call the Mac "dominant", but if there had only been a 2:1 market share deficit I bet we'd have been fighting over this for the last 20 years.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

There was, as far as I can tell, a long while where Ford was at least the most beloved automaker and perhaps even dominant by volume (I don't have sales figures from the 1910s and 1920s at my elbow). But, GM eventually became the volume leader and, wouldn't you know, press interest and even adulation eventually followed.

All else being equal, mindshare will generally follow market share. But the point that I and others have made at significant length is that all else is not equal between iOS and Android.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

The most obvious way to "decide" this is to notice the obvious: Android and iOS are carving up the market between them. There is not always a "Highlander" result for markets. Ford survived despite GM's "dominance"; we're not necessarily talking Microsoftian levels of dominance here for anyone.

There's no way around this problem. "Simple market share" has turned out to be just as contentious as other indicators of platform strength. Rightly so — there's no reason to privilege this particular metric as being somehow more valid or more objective than others. This isn't a formal competition with predefined victory conditions. Different users legitimately value different things, and in fact different industry players are themselves playing for different outcomes. There's going to be ongoing debate.

Maybe, but it has two advantages: 1) It is measurable, and 2) despite protestations, everyone cares about it.

Indeed, as long as Apple is winning, I see Apple partisans perfectly happy to argue share. When that disappears, suddenly, other measures (like profit, which are hardware measures here) start appearing.

Moreover, think of all the postings trying, one way or another, to deny Android's progress while it is happening. Or, even now, "it's not really a smartphone" arguments to basically restore Apple's market share through the back door.

People care.

The question of interest is: is there any neutral way to measure these other things?

The other piece of it is, even if Apple is interested in hardware dominance, and so doesn't go for total unit dominance, that's a choice it made and, vis a vis the OS, that could be argued as a "too bad" kind of decision.

I really have trouble envisioning an argument about software OS that isn't dominated by share. As a standalone business, at least, it's the main measure, because it will directly correlate with profits, developer interest, and much else.

But, make the argument.

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but if there had only been a 2:1 market share deficit I bet we'd have been fighting over this for the last 20 years.

There's sense in that argument, at least.

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All else being equal, mindshare will generally follow market share. But the point that I and others have made at significant length is that all else is not equal between iOS and Android.

If you really believe the former, the latter is just a rear-guard action that will eventually go poof. Maybe in 20 years but go poof just the same.

"More people choose this, so it's more valuable" is conflating "more valuable" with "valuable to more people". Also, if we're defining value, as, say "the importance, worth, or usefulness of something" (to pick the first dictionary definition I was able to find), it doesn't take price into account; it's not uncommon for people to select products that are less valuable because they're cheaper or more widely available.

Why are you trying to divorce 'value' from price and availability? Those are two fundamental qualities that contribute to value. The iPhone is less valuable to me because it would force me to adopt a much worse plan in order to have it.

Not the value that us nerds care about. Not the "my OS is cooler than your OS" value. Not the "I can play Magic: The Gatheric and you can't" value. But the regular, everyday value that people operate on every day. When someone buys a phone, they're not just "obtaining a shiny toy", they're making a value decision that combines all of the things that are important to them, including the money in their pocket and the carrier they would like to go with and the connectivity options that are available to them. Just because you want to restrict the scope of "value" to only the technical qualities that you deem appropriate doesn't make it correct.

If you have to fundamentally twist basic notions of value to make your argument, then how relevant can your claims possibly be?

How sad that iOS needs an app to access that. Why would Android users need an app for that when they have fully functional browsers to use?

I'm not sure which is more amusing: 1) You didn't actually link to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse app, and instead assumed I was talking about a video player2) You linked to a Flash player which is going away in Android yet claim it's an advantage.

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Scrabble? I'll take Words with Friends for that thanks.

I wonder how people that promote Android because of "choice", while at the same time being so dismissive of other people's choices.

Why are you trying to divorce 'value' from price and availability? Those are two fundamental qualities that contribute to value. The iPhone is less valuable to me because it would force me to adopt a much worse plan in order to have it.

Not the value that us nerds care about. Not the "my OS is cooler than your OS" value. Not the "I can play Magic: The Gatheric and you can't" value. But the regular, everyday value that people operate on every day. When someone buys a phone, they're not just "obtaining a shiny toy", they're making a value decision that combines all of the things that are important to them, including the money in their pocket and the carrier they would like to go with and the connectivity options that are available to them. Just because you want to restrict the scope of "value" to only the technical qualities that you deem appropriate doesn't make it correct.

If you have to fundamentally twist basic notions of value to make your argument, then how relevant can your claims possibly be?

You go on and on about "value decisions" yet you still don't get that other people have different values than you. Now shut up and read that again: Other people have different values than you.

And considering that mobile gaming is tied with social media (Facebook, Twitter) for the time used on mobile devices, and gaming is the most profitable app category by far, there are lots and lots of people that clearly have different values than you.

When someone buys a phone, they're not just "obtaining a shiny toy", they're making a value decision that combines all of the things that are important to them, including the money in their pocket and the carrier they would like to go with and the connectivity options that are available to them and apps that they want to use.

You go on and on about "value decisions" yet you still don't get that other people have different values than you. Now shut up and read that again: Other people have different values than you.

Oh I realize that other people have different values that me. It just seems that when it comes to valuing the "better app ecosystem" on iOS, most people have the same lack of regard for it that I do. They care about other things more than that. How else do you explain their purchasing decisions?

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When someone buys a phone, they're not just "obtaining a shiny toy", they're making a value decision that combines all of the things that are important to them, including the money in their pocket and the carrier they would like to go with and the connectivity options that are available to them and apps that they want to use.

Absolutely. It just seems pretty clear that the all the platforms provide most of the apps that most people want to use. Any further differentiation in the app market doesn't seem to be affecting the fact that most people are still buying Android.

If the ecosystem difference is as important as you're making it out to be, why isn't it influencing purchases?

Perhaps my suggestion that the baseline functionality for apps is sufficiently met on all the platforms, and that buyers are choosing based on other concerns, is the correct way to look at it?

How sad that iOS needs an app to access that. Why would Android users need an app for that when they have fully functional browsers to use?

I'm not sure which is more amusing: 1) You didn't actually link to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse app, and instead assumed I was talking about a video player2) You linked to a Flash player which is going away in Android yet claim it's an advantage.

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Scrabble? I'll take Words with Friends for that thanks.

I wonder how people that promote Android because of "choice", while at the same time being so dismissive of other people's choices.

You click on the game you want to play, and Pluto is directed along the waterways etc.

I didn't claim it was an advantage, just pointing out that Android devices don't need a special app, they can use the browser based version the developers had already developed. Rendering your point mute.

You go on and on about "value decisions" yet you still don't get that other people have different values than you. Now shut up and read that again: Other people have different values than you.

Oh I realize that other people have different values that me. It just seems that when it comes to valuing the "better app ecosystem" on iOS, most people have the same lack of regard for it that I do. They care about other things more than that. How else do you explain their purchasing decisions?

They're buying the cheapest "enhanced feature phone" available when they walk into the Verizon Store/Best Buy/etc, which is usually an Android phone.

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Absolutely. It just seems pretty clear that the all the platforms provide most of the apps that most people want to use. Any further differentiation in the app market doesn't seem to be affecting the fact that most people are still buying Android.

You're still struggling with the concept of "It's not important to me, therefore it's not important."

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If the ecosystem difference is as important as you're making it out to be, why isn't it influencing purchases?

Looking at iPhone sales and revenue from the App Store, it's clearly influencing purchases. You just can't see beyond your personal bias.

They're buying the cheapest "enhanced feature phone" available when they walk into the Verizon Store/Best Buy/etc, which is usually an Android phone.

Not always. Android isn't just cheap phones. It goes from the low end all the way through the high end. They are picking from a wider menu of costs and values. Some people value selection independently of the exact price point they pick (as long as we are discussing "value").

People I know with Android phones aren't buying cheap ones (unless you're so partisan that you want to claim they're all cheap). The people I know probably skew a little upscale, but not as much over all as one might think. My son went Android long ago and his phone is inexpensive. My daughter to my surprise (see recent thread) bought what I regard as a higher end model; the one I bought, in fact.

Neither are using them as "feature phones"; not as they describe their usages to me.

And, if you're not deaf and dumb entirely, there's been substantial evidence generated lately that Android is being used for a lot of "smart" functions like GPS locations of various sorts, "take a picture and deposit your check"; all kinds of things that someone who says "advanced feature phone" would not predict Android users doing. Unless you think just about the entire Fortune 1000 is stupid, they seem to think Android owners want to do these things.

Simply put, there's plenty of evidence on the services side of the ledger that Android is getting substantially equal treatment to Apple. Heck, even Blackberry still is.

So, any attempt to say "Apple is the only real smart phone" requires someone to simply not pay any attention to the overall marketplace, especially for service-backed apps where Android is doing just fine, thank you very much.

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You're still struggling with the concept of "It's not important to me, therefore it's not important."

Are you actually arguing that iPhone owners don't value the service-backed offerings, such as Maps and Navigation, e-mail, and things like Chase's "deposit the check you took the picture of"?

It would seem to me that a lot of these things are looking to be as ubiquitous as Office is in the PC marketplace and with the same outcome in this sense: The app will appear both places.

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Looking at iPhone sales and revenue from the App Store, it's clearly influencing purchases. You just can't see beyond your personal bias.

You're being obtuse. The question is, if it is as universally valuable as the Apple supporter implies, why aren't more people going with Apple? Why isn't Android failing entirely? The wearing-very-thin excuse is that Android somehow "isn't" a smartphone. Seriously, give that one up. Or, do you want to argue with the entire Fortune 1000 about it?

It's like you treat Android owners as living on Mars and as if none of them own PCs or know what an application is.

They're buying the cheapest "enhanced feature phone" available when they walk into the Verizon Store/Best Buy/etc, which is usually an Android phone.

You still haven't provided any justification for this claim. You can string together these words again and again as much as you want, but it won't make them true.

Just because you don't wan't to admit that most people could go and want to buy a smartphone that you don't think is the preferrable choice, and using the fact that the userbase doesn't browse as much as you think they should, or buy as many apps as you think they should, you're trying to discredit those phone purchases from being smartphone purchases at all.

You're desperately trying to make reality bend to your peculiar view of how people should behave, and what they should expect out of a smartphone.

But unfortunately, it turns out that people who want to buy smartphones don't really care about Magic: The Gathering, and Disney Playtime Whatever. It's sad that the fact that they don't care about these sorts of things would lead you to try to characterize their needs as being only relevant to "enhanced featurephones".

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You're still struggling with the concept of "It's not important to me, therefore it's not important."

It's not important to them. If it was, they'd go buy the phone with the "clearly better app ecosystem". They aren't because they don't really care about that as much as they care about other things. Seems to fit my characterization.

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Looking at iPhone sales and revenue from the App Store, it's clearly influencing purchases. You just can't see beyond your personal bias.

So the minority of people who choose to purchase iPhones are then purchasing more apps on average on their iPhones.

It still doesn't speak to the majority who don't care enough about the app differentiation (that you claim is oh so important), to actually buy an iPhone in the first place.

Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that iPhones will never be dominant or anything like that.

What I'm pointing out (and what I think ZZ is pointing out as well), is pretty obvious:

App differentiation is not what's going to lead that platform to dominance (at least not the way things are going currently).

Maybe Apple will lower their prices and achieve dominance that way. Maybe they will have some clever set of channel deals with carriers they use to gain userbase. Maybe they'll come out with some marketing campaign that makes everybody want one really really badly and that causes more people to buy into them. Maybe some combination of the above will happen. Or maybe it won't and they'll just continue making good money tapping the higher end market and maintaining a significant minority userbase.

Whatever the case, "app differentiation" is not going to be the lynchpin there. As much as the people arguing on this forum might wish it to be, it just doesn't matter as much as they think it will.

You haven't provided any justification on the contrary. With Android being so popular, why does Android have so little web traffic compared to iOS?

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Just because you don't wan't to admit that most people could go and want to buy a smartphone that you don't think is the preferrable choice, and using the fact that the userbase doesn't browse as much as you think they should, or buy as many apps as you think they should, you're trying to discredit those phone purchases from being smartphone purchases at all.

You really are stuck with your personal bias that you just can't comprehend this in any terms but winning and losing, instead of actually analyzing the current market.

I don't care about a platform "winning". I'd love for iOS, Android, WP7 and even poor WebOS to all be healthy right now. Money is money. (Fuck Blackberry though - they're too stupid to live.)

You clearly cares about one platform winning, and seem unable to understand that I truly don't.

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It still doesn't speak to the majority who don't care enough about the app differentiation (that you claim is oh so important), to actually buy an iPhone in the first place.

It seems people have different priorities.

Plenty of people are buying iOS devices. In the US, recent purchases are within 5% of each other, and that's not during a new iPhone launch quarter.

It still doesn't speak to the majority who don't care enough about the app differentiation (that you claim is oh so important), to actually buy an iPhone in the first place.

Keep in mind, also, that the big difference between the two is that in the Apple universe, people are doing more of the "for pay" option.

There are billions of downloads of Android apps. Way more than can be accounted for with the "feature phone" meme. And, as already pointed out, the Fortune 1000 is busy making all kinds of apps-backed-by-services and doesn't seem to prefer Apple or even Apple AND Android.

It seems that no one platform (not even a pair of them) "own" what a smartphone is.

So, the question really is why is the for pay option going to drive differential adoption as opposed to all the other things that Apple does well.

Personally, I'd look to Apple's hardware story, especially on the tablet side, but also on the phone side. Damn nice stuff and I don't think anyone really disputes that.

Seems to me likely to be the much bigger factor. Are consumers really turned on by a few extra games as opposed to, say, retinal displays?

I'm willing to acknowledge that it helps. More apps is always better for consumers. But is it a major market mover? Far less clear. Not with Android having cleared the multiple hundred K mark and with the services world in love (it seems) with everything, even Blackberry that they must know has a limited shelf life.

Maybe, but it has two advantages: 1) It is measurable, and 2) despite protestations, everyone cares about it.

There are people who don't care about market share as an end-in-itself. You're talking to one. You shouldn't necessarily read the fact that Apple fans are happy to rely on market share when Apple is winning on that metric as a demonstration those Apple fans believe it's the best measure of platform strength; there's a logic to using a metric your opponents will accept, even if it's not the metric you consider the most meaningful.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

The question of interest is: is there any neutral way to measure these other things?

As we've discovered with Android tablets there isn't even really a neutral way to measure market share, exactly.

It's like IQ. People want intelligence to be measurable and reducible to a single number, but things just aren't that simple.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

I really have trouble envisioning an argument about software OS that isn't dominated by share. As a standalone business, at least, it's the main measure, because it will directly correlate with profits, developer interest, and much else.

It's not directly correlating with such things with respect to Android vs. iOS. This is what has been discussed at extensive length. Despite Android's higher market share, third-party developers, hardware OEMs and Google itself seem to be struggling to make significant amounts of money from the platform.

ZeroZanzibar wrote:

If you really believe the former, the latter is just a rear-guard action that will eventually go poof. Maybe in 20 years but go poof just the same.

Not necessarily. There nothing inherently unsustainable about e.g. iOS's apparently superior user demographics. The gap that presently exists between Android and iOS with respect to things like app/content purchasing and online shopping might go away... but it also might not. The market isn't as well studied, but there's evidence of a gap like that existing between Mac and Windows users even in the mature personal computing market. If iOS users are still spending more money than Android users in five or ten years, iOS might still tend to get access to innovative new apps/services first and might still have outsized mindshare.

But speaking of rear-guard actions... Android is generally portrayed as Google triumphantly entering a new market, but there's another interpretation of Android — it's an expensive rear-guard action by Google to protect its web indexing + advertising business from disruption by vertically integrated platforms, and the continued successes of iOS, and in particular those numbers showing how many minutes per month users are spending in apps, show that it has only been a partial success.

That's the statement of your view that is most consistent with all of the evidence. I don't believe you have actually said this.

I said it on this page. Read more, post less.

But cheap isn't a platform. There's no stickiness or loyalty - it's just cheap, which is fine until someone is cheaper.

Ultimately it's fine for Google, because they don't really care about users using apps. They're just using Android so they can sell Android users to advertisers, and they probably prefer it if you're using Google apps and not trying to install things they don't control access to and/or can't use to generate an advertising profile on you.

I'm willing to acknowledge that it helps. More apps is always better for consumers. But is it a major market mover? Far less clear. Not with Android having cleared the multiple hundred K mark and with the services world in love (it seems) with everything, even Blackberry that they must know has a limited shelf life.

Ecosystem strength has always been a major market mover for platforms, maybe the major market mover. To the extent that this is less true with phones than traditional PCs I only see that gap closing over time. I think ecosystem strength is already absolutely critical with tablets, which may be a major reason why Android has had so much trouble in that market.

And remember, ecosystems aren't solely about apps now. They're also about books/music/video. Apple is stronger on all of those than Google. It's virtually never discussed anymore, but the fact that the iPhone was, in Apple's words "the best iPod [they'd] ever made" probably played a huge role in its fast uptake, particularly in the year before it was opened to third-party apps.

Ultimately it's fine for Google, because they don't really care about users using apps. They're just using Android so they can sell Android users to advertisers, and they probably prefer it if you're using Google apps and not trying to install things they don't control access to and/or can't use to generate an advertising profile on you.

Yup. This is one of the things I was referring to what I said the players here aren't even playing for the same outcomes. Google ultimately has no inherent interest in end-user platforms, and a lot of their decisions about Android reflect this. Ultimately, to the extent that users are spending time in apps rather than on the open, indexable web, this undermines Google's core business. This is true of Android apps as well as iOS apps. If it weren't for the threat posed by iOS, it's likely Google's OS ambitions would be tilted much more heavily toward Chrome OS. Moving essentially all of the value in consumer computing out onto the web is an idea whose time hasn't come yet, but it's much more Google's speed. It's what Google-lead disruption would have looked like, had there not been an Apple-lead disruption to which Google felt it had to respond.

Nothing was provided which supported your assertion that app differentiation has such a big significance.

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You haven't provided any justification on the contrary. With Android being so popular, why does Android have so little web traffic compared to iOS?

Because people don't browse the web as much on them. That's the explanation. Just like I don't browse the web much on my phone.

Explain how that makes their purchase equivalent to an "enhanced featurephone".

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You clearly cares about one platform winning, and seem unable to understand that I truly don't.

Yeah, that's why I bought an iPhone, switched to an Android because I could get a better plan by doing that (and posted about it several years ago, in the BF, when I did that), bought an iMac, and generally spend money on both sides of the pond.

Obviously you came to the conclusion that I care about one platform "winning" due to my repeated assertions that platform differentiation doesn't matter as much as people are asserting it does. Because that's clearly something somebody will only say if they're interested in one side winning.

You should watch more episodes of Blues Clues before trying to put your reasoning together. You clearly haven't gotten the hang of it yet.

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Plenty of people are buying iOS devices. In the US, recent purchases are within 5% of each other, and that's not during a new iPhone launch quarter.

Great Good for Apple. It still has nothing to do with platform differentiation, or "better app ecosystem", or any of the bullshit that you care so deeply about and argue fervently about. People don't really care as much about those things as you think they do.

But cheap isn't a platform. There's no stickiness or loyalty - it's just cheap, which is fine until someone is cheaper.

EXACTLY. Now you're getting the hang of it. If Apple makes their stuff cheaper, or more available, or some combination of the two, or does some marketing to make their products more desirable (even more desirable than they currently are), they'll sell more and take back the sales figures from Android over time.

Good to see you getting off of that ridiculous "app differentiation is super important" bullshit. Keep it up

It was pretty sweet for users They drove the cost of computing down to the point where the lower classes could actually afford it.

So today, the generally wealthy can buy themselves pretty high end machines like macbooks, while those that aren't as wealthy can still buy computers that let them do the things they need, at extremely affordable prices.

One would hope for such a fortunate outcome for users in the smartphone market as time progresses.

IMO they drove just just beyond the sweet spot for users. Margins were so low that OEMs had to augment sales by installing crapware, bundleware, and trialware to the point that a new PC was driven off the showroom floor requiring maintenance. Let's not repeat the mistakes we made in the PC world in mobile.

I agree there needs to be cheap devices but if getting those prices down requires diminishing the user experience that's probably not wise.

IMO they drove just just beyond the sweet spot for users. Margins were so low that OEMs had to augment sales by installing crapware, bundleware, and trialware to the point that a new PC was driven off the showroom floor requiring maintenance. Let's not repeat the mistakes we made in the PC world in mobile.

I agree there needs to be cheap devices but if getting those prices down requires diminishing the user experience that's probably not wise.

So you'd rather preclude thousands of people on the low end from being able to afford computers so that they can be saved the trauma of a "poor user experience"?

Here's one example of a shitty user experience: the one where you don't have a computer because you can't afford one.

As an immigrant family living close to the poverty level, my family scrimped and saved for YEARS so that they could buy me a computer when I was a teenager. There are still families like mine, thousands of them, and they don't have to scrimp and save nearly as much anymore to afford something for their kids to learn on and play with. You'd take that away from them because you have some stick up your ass about "user experience"?

I'm all for people in developing nations getting their hands on technology no matter what the cost. I'm more concerned about the lower/middle class American who just maxed out his third credit card to get a PC for his kid only to get one that runs at reduced speed because of all the crapware running from first boot and have it fall victim to PC-cruft slowdown sooner than later.

We don't buy fridges plastered with bumper stickers for other products and empty, unremovable, faux food packages preinstalled no matter what the cost. Why accept any less of a standard for technology?

The problem is that a price threshold doesn't discriminate between somebody whose "maxed out their third credit card", and a genuinely lower income family that is trying to get a tool for themselves or their children.

If you move the price point up, then it's not the difference between "shitty computer with a bunch of preloaded crap" and "computer with better user experience".. for many it's the difference between "shitty computer with a bunch of preloaded crap" and "no computer at all".

Regardless, the commodification driven the PC has made it so that a workable computer can be obtained for ~$200 these days. And what was the cost we paid? A highly competitive market that drove down the prices of everything from memory to storage to disk space to graphics cards to cpus.. year after year after year. Resulting in a situation today where almost anyone can get in on computing hardware that are several orders of magnitude more powerful, for prices that are an order of magnitude lower than they were just a decade and or two ago.

Bring on the cutthroat price competition. Lord knows the world needs more of it. I'm not losing sleep about manufacturers having to survive on razor thin margins. That's a sign of capitalism working efficiently to deliver benefits to people.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is developing a smartphone that would vie with Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone and handheld devices that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Foxconn International Holdings Ltd. (2038), the Chinese mobile- phone maker, is working with Amazon on the device, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. Amazon is seeking to complement the smartphone strategy by acquiring patents that cover wireless technology and would help it defend against allegations of infringement, other people with knowledge of the matter said.

A smartphone would give Amazon a wider range of low-priced hardware devices that bolster its strategy of making money from digital books, songs and movies. It would help Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos -- who made a foray into tablets with the Kindle Fire -- carve out a slice of the market for advanced wireless handsets.

I swear Bezos is just trolling me at this point. What's the fucking point of making a smartphone when you can hardly turn a profit from anything else you sell as is?

I talked to a fairly highly ranked manager at Amazon, and he explained to me that Amazon pretty much makes the same amount of profit for any given item, so it's all about sheer number of items moved. So, if they grow in sheer count of items sold, of any type, they do better. If a cellphone increases the items moved per person, it's pure win for them.

I swear Bezos is just trolling me at this point. What's the fucking point of making a smartphone when you can hardly turn a profit from anything else you sell as is?

I came here to post this. Beats the hell out of me too.

I also don't see what their angle is. The Fire was (kind of) successful in spite of its crappy software because it was a dirt cheap media consumption device with no competition at it's price point so you could try and overlook the actual experience. That model doesn't really work for a phone.